Rob Mathes Music

EVENING TRAIN

Evening Train album art (downloadable)

• 1. Prelude (Evening Train)
• 2. Fatman
• 3. End Of the Day
• 4. Next Stop
• 5. Evening Train
• 6. Tiny Hands
• 7. Another World
• 8. (I Wanna Be) Plastic
• 9. Don't Let Me Fall
• 10. I Slept 12 Hours
• 11. Meet Me By The Riverside
• 12. When I Was A Child
• 13. Segue
• 14. Although It Is The Night
• 16. You Make Me Weep (hidden track)

This is the record where I figured it out. I always knew I was a man without a country. Eclectic in the extreme. Shards of Gospel oriented blues with lyrics about the hound of heaven chasing my tail. Other songs more overtly sensual i.e. “Fatman” and “I Slept 12 Hours.” Rich almost Claude Thornhill/Gil Evans-like voicings with a Flute tinged Horn section in “Plastic” and yet pure Billy Masters meets Duane Allman slide guitar on “Meet Me By The Riverside.”

What I mean by figuring it out is that this record could only have been made, for better or worse, by me. It is a combination of elements, a yearning search for melody that comes from years of listening to records like Pete Townshend’s “All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes,” Sting’s “The Soul Cages,” Peter Gabriel’s “Us,” and a ton of American blues and gospel married to my work as an orchestrator and arranger. If you listen carefully, you’ll hear bits of Mingus and Nelson Riddle in there and Elgar and Britten (just bits and suggestions mind you---I tread not with the immortals---too dangerous).

If nothing else, this album contains four of my best moments as a songwriter: “Evening Train,” “Another World,” “When I Was A Child,” and “Although It Is The Night.” My only real mistake was that I didn’t have the courage to just put “You Make Me Cry” on the CD other than as a hidden track. One of my best little moments with Strings and Voice, it is a song written for Sarah Mathes, my middle daughter of three, who has a fatal peanut allergy. I heard Keith Jarrett’s “I Loves You Porgy” off his The Melody At Night, With You record and had to drive to the side of the road I was so bowled over. I immediately wrote that lyric, just having heard about Sarah’s diagnosis. I thought it too much of a departure and one that would cause an eclectic record to topple over into being inconsistent and flailing stylistically. I was probably right but people missed the song and only a few stumbled onto it. Track 15 is 30 seconds of space. Track 16 is “You Make Me Cry.”

The record is dedicated to my grandfather Arthur Ballou who died of colon cancer in October of 1983. An indelible and inspiring presence in my family’s life, he was a giant and the kindest and most purely good man I ever met. He rode the rails. A train engineer. Drove steam trains. Drove diesel trains. John Henry had nothing on Arthur Ballou.